From experience, usability testing is THE most enlightening and powerful activity that brands can carry out to answer an extensive range of questions which can be crucial to how their website performs.

As well as providing genuine evidence of what people are doing on websites, usability testing provides compelling insights as to WHY people are doing what they are doing. OK, stay with me on this, I know I’m not enlightening anyone so far with this statement…

The problem (or opportunity) is the term usability testing, or user testing, whichever you prefer to use. Testing is much more than just testing the ‘usability’ of a website, much more than just testing how affective a website is in achieving its goals.

The list of complaints ranges from performance speed to pure usability issues. Implementing change to an existing service can be difficult so we decided to test the new site with some potential users to see if this was a case of people reacting badly to something new, or whether indeed there was valid reason for concern.

No matter how many times I am involved in user testing sessions, I never stop learning about people's browsing habits and the different aspects of a company’s proposition that affect how people respond to a given website.

Recently we have carried out two days of user testing for a high street retailer, and although these aren’t groundbreaking, what follows are nine key online shopping insights that all nine women (there should have been 10 but we had a late no-show) who took part provided during the test sessions.

Microsoft is launching a TV ad campaign this week to attempt to persuade web users to make the switch from Google to Bing.

After seeing the Bing ad, which attacks the 'information overload' of Google's results, presumably a few Google users will be persuaded to give Bing a try, but will they be impressed enough to stick with it?

Judging by some user testing I've seen, it will take a lot more from Bing to get users to make the switch...